Haiti Update I flew down to Haiti with a retired engineer named Ron who does all the electrical work for the clinic. I forgot how long and miserable the trip to Haiti was, especially the drive across the DR. Fortunately, the Dominican Republic is beautiful, so the 6-hour drive after 6 hours on airplanes was less unpleasant than it might have been. We arrived in a small village called Banica (which is along the border with Haiti) late on the first night. I waited for fifteen minutes before putting on bug spray, and I got about 2 mosquito bites for each unprotected minute. I stayed in Banica for one day, and then headed into Haiti. We loaded up the large army truck with medical supplies and had driven about half a mile when we crashed into an enormous ditch on the side of the road (it was about five feet wide and ten feet deep). You see, the brakes on the army truck sometimes don’t work (because the brake lines leak), so when the driver swerved to miss another truck he was unable to stop before falling off the side of the road. Careening at full speed into a large ditch was actually pretty terrifying. After the accident, a Haitian priest came to pick us up in his old, beat up Land Rover. The road to Thomassique was in even worse condition than I thought it would be in the rainy season. It was really muddy and much of road was covered in standing water. I couldn’t believe we made it—there were several points where we were wading through water and I was sure we were going to capsize and drown. I am still surprised by how desperately poor Haiti is: all along the road I saw naked, frail children with bizarre growths and rashes on their bodies. But there is something truly beautiful about this country—it’s really breathtaking. Everywhere I go, I am followed by a small mob of Haitian children. Two of them in particular, Wisne and Garens, follow me everywhere. On the first day, they promised to find me a Haitian girlfriend. I told them I don’t need a Haitian girlfriend for now, but they apparently have one lined up if I change my mind. When I go to town, children run into the street screaming "Blan! Blan!" ("Whitey! Whitey!") and beg me to take their picture. We just got a computer and internet here in the clinic. Everyone is absolutely fascinated by the computer.  I have been helping the clinic doctor, Dr. Jozef, make some forms for the clinic. Two men from Port-Au-Prince came yesterday to install internet at the clinic, and it was quite the event. All the important people from the town dropped by to watch, dressed up in their Sunday best. As I write this, I am surrounded by children who are watching me use the computer with awe. I live in a staff house which is adjacent to the clinic. I live with Dr. Jozef, an apprentice (Dr. Alex), and two female nurses. We work and eat together each day. We get along really well, and we joke around a lot. During the day, I work at the clinic doing whatever is needed. Sometimes I work at the front door as a receptionist. I am slowly learning how to write Haitian names, which are often difficult for me to spell because they use French spellings. Sometimes I work in the pharmacy dispensing medicine. And sometimes I work with Dr. Josef or Dr. Alex, assisting them in patient care. For the past few days, my main job has been putting together an inventory of all the medicines we have and determining how much of each kind of medicine we need each month. This has been difficult because many medicines come under many different names, and so I’ve had to learn what certain medicines are used for and which medicines are interchangeable (I’m still learning). Right now, we desperately need many different kinds of medicine because we go through them very fast. The patients have all sorts of terrible afflictions. I’ve seen some really gross stuff already. Haitians are very stoic people, though. They rarely complain, and they usually don’t come to the clinic until their condition becomes unbearable. The clinic opens at 8AM, but by then there is already a sizeable crowd of patients waiting outside the clinic in the sun. The clinic stays open until all the patients have been seen, but we also get a steady trickle of emergency patients throughout the night (mainly women giving birth or people with broken bones). I wake up about 5AM each morning (because there are roosters everywhere and the crow continuously from 5AM until about 7AM). I’ve definitely had to get used to having animals everywhere—chickens, goats, and pigs mainly—and by everywhere, I mean everywhere: in the bathroom, in the operating room, under my bed, etc… Before and after working at the clinic, I have lots of work, mainly teaching staff how to use the computer or working with Ron (the engineer). Ron brought 3 Dominican guys over to help him with his work. Of course, Ron only speaks English, the Dominicans only speak Spanish, and the clinic staff only speak Creole. Because I know about 4 Spanish words, I have become the universal translator, and it seems like nothing gets accomplished unless I pantomime everything ridiculously and speak in a loud, slow mixture of Creole, Spanish, and English. Speaking of which, my Creole is improving rapidly, which is encouraging. I have already been asked twice if I was born in Haiti, which has pretty much been the highlight of my week. Everyone here wants to learn English. I am constantly hounded by people who want me to teach them English because speaking English is a really valuable skill in Haiti (you have to speak English to hold a government job here). People are actually learning quickly, especially one of the Dominicans (Wilkin) and Dr. Jozef. I have already taught them the word "player." Everytime I see them, they give me a fist pound and say "Sup playa?" It makes me so proud. Today, the clinic cook brought me a letter from her son (who is also named Julian). In the letter, which was written in almost incomprehensible pseudo-English, he asked me if he could come to the clinic to speak English with me so he could become fluent and move to the United States. I wrote him back on an index card and said I would be happy to speak English with him anytime. I gave the index card to the cook, and she received it with utter reverence. Okay that’s all for now. There is much more to say, and I will write more later. With love from Haiti, Julian

Update 2 Well, a lot has happened in the last week. I’m getting to know the people around here a lot better. There are many children who constantly hang out around the clinic and staff house and I’m quickly getting a feel for their personalities (it’s easy to remember who’s who because they always wear the same clothes because most people here only have one outfit). Garens is one of my favorites. He has a very gentle personality. A few days ago, he pulled me aside and asked if I could give him money so he could go to school (there are no free schools in this part of Haiti). He is very shy. When he wants to talk to me, he takes me aside and talks to me in private, because he is too embarrassed to ask me for money in front of the other children. I spoke with the local priest and arranged for him to attend one of the schools here in Thomassique. I told him he must study very hard because I will stop paying for him if I hear he is not doing well. He was very excited—right now he doesn’t know how to read or write (he is 14), and he really wants to learn how. Attending school is a real privilege around here. I’d have to say Anelson, a three-year old boy who always wears the same ripped shirt (without pants or underwear), is my favorite of the children, mainly because he’s really cute. He’s sort of become my Creole instructor, because, quite frankly, I speak at about a three-year-old’s level right now. I made the mistake of picking him up and letting him sit on my lap last week, and since then he comes to the staff house each night and follows me everywhere. I usually sit on the roof of the staff house each evening, and Anelson climbs right up after me. The rest of the children are a little shy around me, but not Anelson—he walks right into the house and climbs into my lap without hesitation. As I write this, he is sitting in my lap banging computer keys. (He LOVES typing. He says he can type faster than me, and proves it by banging on the laptop while I’m trying to write. This email has taken a long time to compose because I constantly have to erase his nonsense. He’s very persistent). Yesterday Anelson asked me for a box. I didn’t quite understand why, but I gave him one and he was absolutely thrilled. I asked him what he was going to use it for, and he said "It’s a toy!" Last week, Dr. Alex took me for a drive around Thomassique on his motorcycle, and I really, really enjoyed it. I had never been down any of the back alleys to see the slums before, but this time Dr. Alex took me everywhere. Most of the buildings in Thomassique are houses. There are maybe 10 stores in the whole village. The houses are usually made out of sticks and pieces of scrap metal and have dirt floors. A few people have concrete houses. Our tour of Thomassique was cut short by the rain, and the drive back was actually a little scary because the roads are very bad (they’re sort of like creek beds), and Dr. Alex was driving really fast because he wanted to get out of the rain. I almost flew off several times as we were driving through the bumpy, muddy roads. I am continuing to learn about various diseases. It seems the most common affliction people who come to the clinic have is parasites, because the water in this part of Haiti is infested with all sorts of horrible things. After parasites, I’d say the next most common afflictions are Malaria and Gonorrhea. I’ve seen children with tapeworms, infants with horrible burns (this is common because Haitians cook over open fires—usually the children are burned so badly their skin bubbles and peels off their bodies), 15 year-olds with syphilis, a woman with Parkinson’s, lots of people with AIDS, an epileptic young girl with seizures, and a young mother with breast cancer. I’ve also been assisting with a bunch of births. We have about 4 deliveries each day, and I have to say the birth process is really gross. I’ve been taking pictures of the new babies and promising to get the pictures developed and bring them back to the mothers. This makes them so happy they usually cry. Everyone here wears donated American clothes. Oftentimes I’ll see a boy wearing pink shoes with princesses on them or a girl wearing a little league football t-shirt. They don’t understand what the shirts say and they don’t have the same ideas of gender-specific colors that we do. Today I took a picture of a 14 year-old boy wearing a tank top that said "I Heart Boys A Lot." He asked me what his shirt said, and I told him it said "I like people a lot." I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth, because it is probably the only shirt he owns. The English/Creole index cards that I made before I left the States have become quite the precious commodity around here. Everyone wants to use them. I have over a thousand, and I’m trying to dole them out equally to everyone who works in the clinic. I am very happy to be here. Usually I don’t stop to think about how crazy it is that I’m here, but every now and then it hits me. Such as each Friday, when our food supplies (plantains, rice, and a few live chickens) are delivered via mule. Okay, I have to go now. A storm is coming in, which means we’ll soon lose internet. Love, Julian

 

More news from Haiti! I really like the people who work here at the clinic, especially Jacquis, the general maintenance man and maid. He keeps the clinic and staff house clean, he works at the front door at the clinic, and he maintains the generator and water pump. He is a very good, humble man, and he is always kind to the many children who are always hanging around the house. Yesterday he asked me if he could get paid for the next month in advance because he had to buy shoes for his children on credit (he has 6 children, which is below average for this region—yesterday I talked with a woman who had 15 kids). He works about 12 hours each day and makes slightly less than $3 a day, making him one of the best paid men in Thomassique. After I agreed to pay for Garens to go to school, many other children asked me to pay for them. I only had enough money to pay for four more: Wisne (age 14), Wilson (age 8), Gabin (age 10), and Wisly (age 13). Making the arrangements for school was extremely complicated. First I had to find suitable schools for all of them. None of them can read or write, so Jacquis had to help me find schools that would accept older children who are illiterate. Getting them enrolled was also difficult, since all the suitable schools were full. When we first met with the director of Lekol Nasyonal (the school we chose for Garens and Wisne), he said it wasn’t possible to enroll them. Then Jacquis muttered something under his breath, and the director was instantly accommodating and agreed to enroll them right away. After we left, I asked Jacquis what he had said under his breath. Jacquis smiled and replied, "I told him he should know better than to say no to an American." After enrolling the children, we had to go to Thomassique’s large outdoor market to buy fabric for the school uniforms. After that we had to buy tennis shoes (which are required, but which none of the children had), and then we had to hire a seamstress to sew the uniforms. Altogether it cost me about $25 to put each kid in school. To get the kids ready for school, I started teaching them the alphabet. I printed out a copy of the alphabet for each of the kids and showed them how to write each letter. It wasn’t long before other children took notice and asked for their own copy of the alphabet. Before I knew it, I was running an impromptu alphabet school out of the staff house. All the children are so eager to learn. They come early in the morning and wait around all day for me to finish work. They diligently write the alphabet over and over again and then run up to show me. When their work is good, I reward them with their very own bar of soap—pretty much the best incentive possible in Thomassique, short of a plane ticket to the US. It’s really heart-breaking to watch them work, especially a 16 year-old named Pierre who struggles the most. I teach them for about an hour each day, and then send them home because I have other work to do. Yesterday evening I stood out front with Jacquis, watching the children run out into the road excitedly clutching their copies of the alphabet and happily chanting the names of the letters. "Ke’m fe’m mal," I muttered under my breath. Jacquis nodded, and said in almost perfect English, "Your heart hurts you." Last week, there was a motorcycle accident in Thomassique, and some men brought in a ten year-old boy who was really badly injured. He was a gruesome sight: the skin on one leg had entirely peeled off, exposing all the bone and muscle underneath. The other leg was badly broken, and he had cuts everywhere. He was terrified, and when he saw me he said, "Blan, hold my hand." I sat on the bed and held his hand while he writhed and screamed as the doctors worked. It was probably the hardest thing I’ve had to watch so far. The entire time, his little sister peered into the room through the cracked door and cried quietly. I’ve also become something of a lab technician. I found a bunch of equipment in the clinic lab, and I taught myself how to do tests for Malaria, Gonorrhea, Syphilis, and Dengue Fever. (This sounds more impressive than it actually is, because all of the tests came with very detailed instructions that are really easy to follow.) So now I spend a considerable amount of time each day doing tests for the doctors. My least favorite test is Gonorrhea because it involves a rather disgusting procedure. Two weekends ago, I went with Dr. Joseph and the local priest (Fr. Ronel) on a two-day trip around the country. Haiti is really mountainous and strikingly beautiful. We visited Henche, Thomond, Cange, Mirebeleis, and Port-Au-Prince. The entire country is impoverished, but as far as I can tell, it doesn’t get any poorer and more isolated than Thomassique. In Cange, I got to see Paul Farmer’s clinic and the headquarters of Zanmi Lasante (his organization). We met there with Zanmi Lasante’s medical procurator, and I think we worked out a solution for obtaining our medicines jointly. Everywhere we went, people stared at me. And no wonder: I have yet to see a single other white person in Haiti, even in Port-Au-Prince. Dr. Joseph says most of the foreigners have left Haiti since the most recent spat of violence and political instability. Port-Au-Prince was much like I imagined it would be: crowded, dirty, and dominated by slums. With the exception of a few streets in Port-Au-Prince, the roads are uniformly terrible in Haiti. It took us 16 hours to travel about 100 miles on the first day, and along the way we got two flat tires (the Haitians were very impressed that I knew how to change a tire). When Fr. Ronel got tired, he asked me to drive. At first I was a little nervous about crashing and/or dying, but that I was before I realized how fun driving in Haiti is. It wasn’t long before I was driving through several feet of standing water without flinching. Dr. Joseph said I was the best driver he had ever seen. Fr. Ronel called me fearless. I realized under the circumstances these remarks may not have been compliments, but I was flattered nonetheless. On the last leg of our journey on the first day (from Port-Au-Prince back to Mirebeleis), it started to rain really hard while Fr. Ronel was driving. On two occasions, we came to big river crossings where the water level had risen about a foot above the bridge and was rushing across the road. I was terrified, but Fr. Ronel was unfazed. "This happens all the time in Thomassique, but we don’t have nice bridges like this," he said, calmly putting the truck in first gear and charging across the river. Further on, along a particularly desolate stretch of the road, we passed a naked boy covered in mud and standing alone in the rain. He saw me as we passed and raised his hands to me. I couldn’t hear him, but I could read his lips: "I’m hungry, blan." We didn’t have any food or money, and Fr. Ronel didn’t slow down. I watched the boy in the rear view mirror and he stared right back at me until we disappeared around a turn. I couldn’t help but think how easily I could have been born into his life and he into mine. Instead, he stood silently in the mud, and I sat in an air-conditioned truck, and that chance encounter was the closest we would ever come to experiencing what our alternate lives might have been like. That’s all for now, Julian

Hey guys! I returned to Haiti two weeks ago and I’m really happy to be back. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed the place until I got back here. I guess word had gotten around that I was coming, because all of the children were at the clinic waiting for me when I arrived. Dada (aged 14) clutched my arm. "It’s been awful," he said. "No one plays movies for us and I’ve forgotten the alphabet." "Did you bring more soap?" asked Wisnel. "Next time you go to America, you have to take us with you," demanded Nelson. Ron (the retired engineer) and Ashley (a friend from Princeton) came down with me this time. Ron is here for another week or so to finish some building projects, and Ashley is going to stay down here for a couple of months. It’s been weird to have other Americans at the clinic, mainly because I’m speaking English a lot. Maybe I won’t forget it next time I return to the States… The past two weeks have been very busy. A sea container for the clinic arrived in Banica the day after I arrived, and it took us four days and six large truck loads to bring everything over. The first trip was the worst. It took us a full 6 hours to get to Thomassique from Banica because we had several mishaps along the way including: running out of gas, two flat tires, and the battery dying on one of the trucks in the middle of a vast, deserted valley. Needless to say, we didn’t have jumper cables or cell phones, and there was little we could do. While the Dominican drivers tinkered with the engine, Ashley and I walked through the countryside, stumbling upon isolated shacks and taking pictures. I promised one old blind woman to bring back photos of her and her grandchildren. "You are doing a beautiful thing for us," she said. "My name is Archange—don’t forget about me." "I won’t," I promised. Even though I’ve been in Haiti for a little while, the poverty of the country still shocks me. The sight of naked, malnourished children playing in the mud is hard to stomach. The last house we came to before hiking back to the road had four naked children, who stood solemnly out front watching our approach apprehensively. "Where are your clothes?" I asked the oldest, who looked about 7 years old. "I don’t have any yet," he said, looking at the ground. There was really nothing we could do about the truck, and night was approaching quickly as the rain worsened, so we decided to leave it on the road. We put some of the supplies it was carrying on the other truck, but we had to leave most of it behind. Fr. Ronel found two local men and paid them to guard the truck until we could return the next morning. Normally, if you leave a truck on the road around here, it will be stripped of all valuables before sunrise, and so we left knowing full-well that we might lose thousands of dollars’ worth of medicines. Fortunately, nothing was stolen from the truck during the night, and I spent the next few days sorting through all the boxes. The staff was ecstatic, because we had run completely out of medicines, and they were very happy to get more supplies. Things were just starting to settle into a normal rhythm when Hurricane Noel hit. Noel has really devastated much of the island of Hispaniola, but things in Thomassique have been relatively fine. A group of American surgeons were going to come down to perform operations at the clinic next week, but Hurricane Noel’s untimely arrival forced them to cancel because the roads from Santo Domingo to Thomassique are impassable due to flooding, mudslides, and bridge collapses. I brought a few new DVDs for the kids to watch, and so far the most popular new movies have been Shrek 2 and Spiderman, which they call "Green guy" and "the other Peter" (the first Peter being Peter Pan). Shortly after arriving here, Gabin and Garens (two of the kids who are always hanging around me) came to me with a list they had assembled of nine kids who they thought I should put in school. "They don’t have money, and they really want to go to school," said Garens, clearly pleased with himself for this great act of charity. "What do you want me to do with this?" I asked them. "Whatever you want to," shrugged Gabin. "I don’t know if I have enough money," I responded, shoving the list casually into my pocket. Gabin nodded, but they knew as well as I did that I would do it. I had in fact brought extra money down expressly for this purpose. As I learned, the school year is fluid, and even though school officially started two months ago, it’s still easy to put kids in school if you can pay. Ashley is helping me out, and we are currently in the process of getting uniforms for all of the kids. Of course, as soon as word got out that we were putting kids in school, we were inundated with children asking us to help them, and unfortunately we had to turn most of them away. The more I get to know the people around here, the more I realize how incomprehensible their lives are to me. Like Jonas, the oldest son of twelve children. When he was thirteen, his whole family moved to Santo Domingo, leaving him behind to care for his grandmother. Or Garens, who lives in a house smaller than my bedroom with his 8 siblings and parents. The girls all sleep on a single small bed together and the boys sleep on the dirt floor. I gave Garens a little money for some work he did for me, and he used it to buy a baby pig, which he proudly showed to me this afternoon. Or Francois (age 14), whose perennially absent father has had 19 children with three different women in the village. Francois fell down a ravine and broke his arm last week, but he didn’t come to the clinic right away because he had to watch the animals until his mom returned two days later from selling things in the village. Even amongst all the misery of Thomassique, there’s something particularly heartbreaking about Francois. Maybe it’s that he’s so small for his age. Or maybe it’s the way he cried without making a sound while Dr. Joseph reset his badly broken arm. He seems entirely too sad and burdened for someone so young, and in him I see the degrading effects of acute poverty most clearly. I’ve also forgotten to mention the occasional dance parties we have here in the staff house. Haitians love to dance. When the sky is clear enough, we play music on YouTube, and the staff and children all dance. Until last week, I had categorically refused to dance, but I finally succumbed to the intense peer pressure. It’s a scene hard to describe: the children laughing and showing off new dance moves, the men gyrating their hips in ways that would be considered entirely too feminine in America, Ron smoking his cigar and waving his arms around wildly, his Dominican workers dancing with the Haitian nurses, dirty half-naked children laughing and clapping. For a moment, you could forget your surrounding and think you were in paradise. I hope you all are well, Julian